The North American Star League, often abbreviated as NASL, is a competitive StarCraft 2 league that was introduced in February 2011. At the time of its introduction, the NASL was the first American league to rival the Global Starcraft 2 League (GSL), a South Korean production, in numbers of participating players as well as the size of the prize pool.[1]

The mission of the NASL is to foster the prominence of eSports and professional StarCraft 2 play in North America through highly visible, organized and invigorating competition.

To select the participants for the first season, players were asked to submit videos to the NASL leadership answering a series of questions designed to gauge fan interest in the players. The staff reviewed the video interviews as well as community feedback via polls and invited 50 players to participate in the first league.

NASL Tournament Format Graph

The initial 50 players were then seeded into five divisions of ten players each. During the "season play" each division played a round robin schedule of best-of-three matches. The regular season matches were casted live by Geoff "iNcontroL" Robinson and Andre "Gretorp" Hengchua and rebroadcast throughout the week. After the round robins were completed, the top two players from each division advanced to the grand finals, a 16 player live event to determine the winner of the season, and the remaining 40 players were ranked. The top half of the remaining players played in a two round "playoff" tournament where the top 5 players advanced to the grand finals. The final seed in the grand finals was awarded to the winner of a 1024 player open tournament.

The first grand finals, a four round, single-elimination tournament was held in Ontario, California on July 8-10th. The open tournament victor, PuMa went on to win the event and the $50,000 first prize. The event was fraught with technical difficulties and drew some criticism from the gaming community. However, the event was, overall, deemed a success by the Team Liquid writing staff.[2]

The second season of the NASL got off to a rocky start. A conflict over travel stipends caused several Korean teams to withdraw their participation in the league.[3] This caused the league to downsize to five divisions of eight players apiece. Additionally, latency issues caused Fenix to drop out of the league after six weeks of play.[4] The format stayed essentially the same, with ten spots in the grand finals going to the division winners, five spots to the playoff winners, and a final spot to the open tournament champion.

The second grand finals was held December 2nd-4th. The second incarnation of the event faced far fewer technical difficulties than the first, and fans in Ontario, CA watched PuMa capture his second NASL title over HerO, a rematch of the DreamHack Winter 2011 finals the week prior.

The North American Star Team League was announced on January 3rd, 2012.[5] The NASL Team League was an online team tournament played in the off-season between NASL Season 2 and NASL Season 3. The top four teams from the GosuCoaching Premiere League Season 2, Evil Geniuses, Empire, Mouz, and Team Liquid, along with four teams selected from two online qualifiers competed in the two-month-long league.

For Season 3, NASL underwent a number of branding and employee changes. The organization updated the look of their logo, and hired the casting duo of MrBitter and RotterdaM as well as a third caster, Frodan.[6] A number of changes were made to their regular season play as well: effort is made to play and cast games live, and the winner of each match throughout the regular season is awarded $150.[7] Finally, it was announced that the Season 3 finals are going to be held at the International Centre in Toronto, Canada.[8][9]

The Gauntlet, a regional King of the Hill event, was announced on July 31st, 2012.[13] Each week, there would be three king of the hill events; one for North America, Europe and Korea. Each event will feature 10 Grandmaster level players from the region, competing for prize money in each match as well as the chance to come back for a final event at the end of the series.